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Helen Raven is a slash fan writer who has written in a number of a different fandoms. She believes she may have won a few awards but "cannot really remember what they were. Though I do have them in a shoebox at home."

Luckily she can remember her favorite tea, which is Puer.

Interview

In Her Own Words

I’m Fiona Clements. Or Helen Raven when I was writing in The Professionals and Angel fandoms. I think I can confidently say that I am the second-best writer that Professionals fandom ever produced. I’m guessing that I’m also the person here with the longest history as a slash fan, and that’s – mostly - what I’m going to talk about.

I got my hands on slash fiction for the first time in the 1970s, when I was 15, and everything about the process of “getting your hands on slash fiction” differed radically in those days from the way it works now. In my case, there was something that made the process particularly complicated, and that’s the fact that I was born and brought up in the Falkland Islands. At that time the primary school was excellent but the secondary school might as well not have existed, and so, in 1973, when I was 9, I was sent away to a boarding school in North Wales. We were only allowed to watch TV at the weekends, and only allowed out into town every three weeks, for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. I don’t recommend being sent to a boarding school in North Wales in the 1970s – avoid it, if you can.

Star Trek was my first fandom, from around 1974, and this was of course the original series, because Next Gen didn’t start until 1987. I hadn’t seen the program at home because there wasn’t any TV in the Falklands, but it was shown often enough on UK TV that I’d catch a few episodes when I was staying with friends of the family during school holidays. On one of those school holidays I used a book token to buy a couple of books in the series of short story adaptations of the episodes. [see Page 1 in PDF of selected slides from the talk] They were written by James Blish, a respected science-fiction author, and it was these books that turned me into a rabid Star Trek fan.

Like any number of studious, off-putting geeks in an environment obsessed with sport, I identified strongly with Spock, and while Kirk was every attention-seeking extrovert who raised my hackles, I could entirely see why they were necessary to each other. It was completely obvious from the books – and from the few episodes I’d seen – that they loved one another, and I couldn’t get enough of that.

Some time around 1975 there was an article about Star Trek in a high-profile magazine, and from that I learned about the fan club “Star Trek Action Group” (or STAG). The “Action Group” in the title was because they were campaigning to get the BBC to show regular reruns of the show. I joined the club, and from the quarterly newsletters I learned about the zines put out by ScotPress – which I think were the only Trek fanzines being produced in the UK at the time – and I ordered all of those.